[XML-SIG] Introducing me and my projects

[Lalo Martins]

Hello from Brazil!

I am a Python developer since a recommendation from Bruce Perens in 96 and
work (professionally) with Zope since 99.  In 2000 I wrote the original
prototype which led to TAL and PageTemplates.

I recently wrote a reimplementation of TAL/PageTemplates based on a generic
XMLish transform engine, and this is where my interest in XML-sig
originates; I wrote a very generic XML (and XMLish [*]) library I call PAX.

[*] by XMLish I mean things that are "not quite" XML, like "classic" HTML
    and documents that are primarily text with some XML markup in it

Altough the name PAX is a joke with SAX, it's really a DOM-like API similar
in spirit to elementtree (if I knew elementtree when I started I probably
wouldn't have, but now it evolved in its own right).

PAX includes the central element of OpenTAL, the transform engine
(pax.paxtransform).  It badly needs some optimizing ;-) but it's very
powerful featurewise.

I believe the library is now feature-complete, so I started the 1.0 cycle
(pending the optimization, but that will have to wait for my work schedule,
since the company allocated some time for that task later this month).  I
would like to hear opinions on the library.

Since the beginning I released PAX into public domain because I always
intended to offer it for inclusion in the PyXML toolkit.  Even if this
doesn't turn out to happen, I'm glad I did, because that forced me to write
a better, more generic API, IMHO ;-) and cleaner code.

The code is at http://savannah.gnu.org/opental/ - to see pax you just need
the pax release, on the other hand if you want opental you need pax.

(A quick paragraph about OpenTAL: the core feature is that it's easy to add
your own processing to the chain.  I wrote it initially to support the i18n:
namespace, and that is implemented in a completely separate module just to
demonstrate this feature.  Besides that, it also has a TALES context which
can be used sans Zope, and I'm in fact using it in a set of scripts for
generating static HTML from dynamic markup I call OpenTAL.Static - you can
check its progress by downloading OpenTAL, entering its directory and
running "cvs up -d".)

[]s,
                                               |alo
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